Chapter 2 of 8 · What doesn't work today~3 minutes

The state has hundreds of websites and no common set of rules on how they are used

I am not writing this chapter to point fingers. The people who build these websites often work with small budgets and without a model to start from. The problem does not belong to one institution. It belongs to the system.

1. Hundreds of websites, each with its own rules

In the public list of the .gov.ro registry (the domain reserved for Romanian public institutions), I counted more than 600 subdomains, belonging to more than 200 institutions. On top of these come the websites of town halls and county councils, which are not required to use .gov.ro and have their own domains.

I found no component library published by the state that these websites could use. Even the products of the Romanian Authority for Digitalisation (ADR), the government agency for digitalisation, use four different technologies, with no common interface guide.

2. Many websites cannot be used by everyone

Only 25% of the 1,379 public websites checked by ADR in 2025 were rated accessible, in the desktop check. Another 691 were partly accessible, and 346 inaccessible. ADR combined manual checks with automated tools.

“Accessible” means that it can also be used by someone who does not see well, who cannot use a mouse, or who uses a program that reads the screen.

The problem is not new. A 2012 study found that none of the home pages of the 60 municipalities analysed met even the minimum level of the international accessibility standard.

3. Online public services are used far less in Romania

Only 25.4% of internet users in Romania used a website or app of a public authority in 2025. The EU average is 76%. It is the lowest percentage in the EU (Eurostat). In the OECD Digital Government Index 2025, Romania scores 0.24 out of 1, the lowest of the 42 countries assessed. The OECD average is 0.70.

The data does not say that design causes this gap. But a service that is hard to use adds one more barrier between people and the administration.

4. Even the existing rules have gaps

The Government has a visual identity guide, published on identitate.gov.ro. It is a good start, but:

• it has not been approved by any legal act, so it is not mandatory, except for projects with European funding;
• one of its colours, the one for the header bar of prefectures (the Government’s offices in each county), does not have enough contrast with white text to be read easily by everyone;
• it uses fonts with a commercial licence, not free fonts for the web.

5. It has been tried before

In 2016–2017 there was a design guide for state websites, in Romanian (design.gov.ro). It was abandoned at about 70%. The domain has disappeared. The lesson I draw: without a responsible institution, a budget and a permanent team, a project like this risks being abandoned.

6. We don’t know what it costs

There is no public inventory of the state’s digital services, nor any record of how much each institution spends on its website. That is a problem in itself: you cannot improve what you do not measure.

What already works

We are not starting from scratch. There are good rules, which a design system could make easy to follow:

• The minimum structure of institutions’ websites is set by law: five mandatory sections, from “About the institution” to “Institutional integrity”.
• Every public website must have an “Accessibility” section on its home page, with an official model statement in Romanian.
• The colours of the flag have exact values in law, since 2023.
• The “Log in with ROeID” button (ROeID is Romania’s national electronic identity) has public rules for how it looks.
• Law no. 242/2022 (the Romanian law on data exchange between public IT systems) already requires digital services to be user-centred, inclusive and multilingual.
• The Republic of Moldova has had, since 2025, a design system in Romanian, with code that is free to use.

What a design system actually is →